Data centers are usually composed of various Internet Small Computer System Interface (iSCSI) and FibreChannel storage devices, and also even direct attached storage. All of this storage may be from different manufacturers and may have different performance characteristics. Significantly, this storage is fragmented across the data center. As such, it is necessary to combine the multiple storage vendor disks into one large storage pool for ease of accessibility and management.
One current technique for storage pooling is by utilizing a storage gateway. The storage gateway is physical hardware that acts as a front end to the backend storage area network. However, a problem with storage gateways is that they introduce performance and latency issues because they become a central point of failure and a bottleneck. Another technique for storage pooling is logical volume management. Logical volume management has been applied to multiple systems to allow these multiple systems to share the same view of logical volumes available.
Currently, a trend is arising in data centers to run a virtual machine (VM) host server, which hosts VMs with corresponding guest Operating Systems. The host VM server is responsible for creating, destroying, and other management tasks of user-defined VMs that it hosts. The centralized hosting of VMs by the host VM server provides the manageability of sever server-based computing, while the dedicated environment provides the flexibility and compatibility with applications that a desktop enables. In general, VMs therefore enable remote access to a host or server computer by a remote client computer, which mimics or reconstructs the events taking place on the host computer.
Neither of the storage pooling techniques of storage gateways or logical volume management has been applied to mapping a specific grouping of disk blocks to one or more virtual machine block devices from a storage attached network (SAN) environment. As such, a mechanism to connect the fragmented storage across the data center onto a virtual machine guest would be beneficial.